Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare:
On whom that ravening brood of Fate,
Who lap the blood of sorrow, wait:
Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see,
And look not madly wild, like thee?
These excesses were, however, at no time characteristic of the better poets of the time, and were rather the mumbo-jumbo of versifiers who, lacking any personal inspiration, caught a rumour at second or even third hand of a spurious Arcadia, and rhymed it—or blank-versed it—into a spiritless rhetoric. It is only suggestive at a very distant cry, and by the merest implication, of the true nature of Augustan poetry that Richard Jago could write—
And oft the stately Tow’rs, that overtop
The rising Wood, and oft the broken Arch,
Or mould’ring Wall, well taught to counterfeit
The Waste of Time, to solemn Thought excite,